Since the early fifties there have been many accounts of Stalinism. and Stalin, but few I think, have taken stock at the same time of the desperate position of a revolution confined to one country, and of the terrible consequences of the measures taken in the name of defending that revolution.
... the most serious threat to civilization is not to kill a man because of his ideas (this has often been done in wartime), but to do so without recognizing it or saying so, and to hide revolutionary justice behind the mask of the penal code. For by hiding violence one grows accustomed to it and makes an institution of it. (p. 34)
This sounds familiar enough now, but the fact that Merleau-Ponty could write it in 1947 begins to explain how much better prepared he was than most to face the shameful revelations of the fifties.
VIOLENCE in history, Merleau-Ponty concludes, derives from the fact, recorded by Marx in The 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, that although "men make their own history they do not make it under circumstances chosen by themselves." History becomes a nightmare for us, because we cannot know in advance whether the detours we think we must take may not become dead-ends, whether the circumstances may not, in the end, defeat us: and because we suspect that the cost of defeat will be too high. Terrorizing others is one response to the anxiety of trying to make history- their terror of you becomes evidence of your control over the future. That the enormous means of terror in the possession of Hitler and Stalin could not make their control total, does not seem to stop the rest of us from attempting it, with our own methods, in our own lives.
It is difficult to know about yourself, and ought to be even more difficult to say aloud that you are not tempted by violence, that when you are violent it is only because you have to be. I believe that this was true of Merleau-Ponty, not just from the little I know of his life, but from the myriad ways in which he resisted the subtler temptation to what might be called intellectual violence. He never allowed himself to seal off his writing from the claims of others, knowing that they would be made, but refusing to judge in advance which of them would be fair. He ought to make his words particular, and timely, knowing that later they might be turned against him.
This sense of discipline is perhaps the place to begin an explanation of Merleau-Ponty's view of Trotsky. For it is Trotsky's discipline, his permanent refusal to compromise in the face of defeat, exile, and assassination that makes him- as Merleau-Ponty put it-sublime. At the same moment, Merleau-Ponty wonders "whether history is made by such men." (p. 80) In part, he means that too strict a rejection of compromise will cramp the possibility of action as quickly as an easy recourse to terrorism. But Trotsky certainly knew that, and as Merleau-Ponty points out, he did not attempt to seize power from Stalin in 1926. Merleau-Ponty discerns in Trotsky a sort of utopianism-living and dying "for a future projected by desire." (p. 80) But Trotsky saw that in himself, and called it the source of "the greatest human happiness." (p. 79) And late in his life he faced the possibility that without a world revolution at the end of the Second World War, nothing else would remain but "to recognize frankly that the socialist program... [had] ended as a utopia." From a Marxist, there is no more severe condemnation.
Finally, I think what disturbs Merleau-Ponty is that what we revere in Trotsky, the heroism of his life and mind, cannot be imitated. Without the particular circumstances of his life, our attempt to pursue his passion for the truth becomes merely our desire to be right. At the end of his life Merleau-Ponty asked himself
What good is there in having been right yesterday against Stalinism and today against the Algerian affair, what good in patiently untying the false knots of communism and anti-communism, and in setting down in black and white what both know better than we do, if these truths of tomorrow do not exempt a young man from the adventures of fascism and communism today? ("Signs," p. 5)
Merleau-Ponty, it seems to me, was right many times in his life, often alone, facing the vituperation of Left and Right, and living with the misunderstandings of his friends. But to measure his life by the rightness of his beliefs must have seemed to him to be a last refusal to face the ambiguity of history. If we cling to such truths, we make them sterile, because we are forgetting how fragile and momentary our perception of them was, and remains.
IN A MEMORIAL essay, published some months after Merleau-Ponty died, Sartre wrote that "[Merleau-Ponty] showed me that I was making History in the same way that M. Jourdain was speaking prose." ( Situations, p. 176) But to know that we are making history all the time is not yet to know how we are making it, day by day, and how we are to live with such knowledge. When Merleau-Ponty reproached Trotsky for an incomplete attention to "the compromises of everyday history," he was in part recording our need to be awakened to "the importance of daily events and action." He wanted philosophy to provide that awakening, but first it was necessary to realize that philosophy
... cannot tell us THAT humanity will be realized as though it possessed some knowledge apart and were not itself embarked upon experience.. (p. 188)
What philosophy could do, what Merleau-Ponty devoted his work to doing, was to "arouse in us a love for our times ... [and] like the most fragile object of perception- a soap bubble or a wave- or like the simplest dialogue, embrace... indivisibly all the order and the disorder of the world." (p. 189)
Inevitably we come to wonder why, if our concern is for the present, we are so preoccupied with the past. In part, of course, tales of the past can give us courage, or reconcile us to weakness. And arguments from the past sometimes seem to support our own conclusions. But frequently we find that we go back to the past because its quarrels remained unresolved, and its dreams unfulfilled, and we have inherited its disorder. If we respond to this disorder by deploring the weakness and blindness of those who left it to us, we will miss our chances for strength and insight. "History never confesses," wrote Merleau-Ponty, "not even her lost illusions, but neither does she dream of them again." ( Signs, p. 35) When we discover that we persist in those illusions, and when we stop asking the past to condemn itself and justify our present, then we may, if we are careful in our attention, let the past speak for itself. History could then cease to be our nightmare, and we might learn from it to speak, and act, for ourselves.